Making Job Search Easier by Finding the Great Companies First

Blockchain technology will change your life. But how you ask? When I was younger I played in several bands, and in some we wrote our own music. My longest running and most successful venture (which consisted of two recorded albums and mostly free beer for payment from the clubs we played) was with several of my closest childhood friends, one of whom wrote all of our music. When he wanted to ensure that his intellectual property (the songs) were protected, he would mail them to himself and then save them unopened just in case. The fact that they were postmarked by the US postal service, if unopened, served as an inexpensive way to provide proof that he had actually created them at a certain time. So if years down the road he suddenly heard his song playing on the radio but it wasn’t him performing it, he could just pull out the postmarked package and head to a lawyer. Today artistic creations are mostly digital, so having proof of creation is more difficult. Anyone can fake a time stamp on an image, after all. Unless, of course, that time stamp is in the blockchain. If you’re unfamiliar with blockchain technology, it’s the permanent,…

What is UltraHaptics up to and where is this taking us? Sound is a really fascinating thing. It’s just vibrations in space, which theoretical physicists think is what makes up all matter. If you’re an X-Men fan you’ll remember Banshee, the guy who could cause destruction with his screams. The interesting thing is that his mutant ability mimics reality, but it’s not the volume of the scream so much as the frequency. In fact, some scientists have postured that the ancient Biblical story of the impenetrable walls of Jericho falling at the blast of a bunch of trumpets (or shofars) totally could have happened. So back to the premise – sound is fascinating. And the applications now being developed in ultrasound (the frequencies that humans can’t hear) might be the next big evolution in virtual reality. Then again, they might also soon make it easier for you to drive your car without distractions or control your home stereo with virtual haptic controls. A 70’s Throwback In the 1970’s scientists explored the idea of using ultrasonic waves, or ultrasound, to create simulated tactile sensations or haptics – meaning feeling something that wasn’t actually there. But computers and programming weren’t there yet, and the…

Ryan Rogowski, CEO and Cofounder of San Francisco based Waygo Translation App believes that within our lifetime, we’ll be able to translate and speak multiple languages fluently with the help of technology. “I think language as a barrier is being solved and it’s an exciting time to be part of the industry. With globalization happening so fast, there’s this giant problem. But the base technology and hardware is pretty much already there. It’s just now improving the research and software to get things done efficiently for you.” Waygo is an augmented reality startup that focuses on visual, real-time translation for Asian countries (currently Chinese, Japan and Korea). All you need to do is point your smartphone’s camera at the words in question and the app will translate into English in seconds, translating your desired foreign dish is made easier. It gives users an in-depth knowledge of foreign cuisine by providing detailed images of how food dishes are prepared while browsing restaurant menus. “Waygo has evolved as a premier menu translation app that encourages travelers to live and dine like the locals, without the worry of ordering the wrong menu item.” The Waygo team had researched Chinese restaurant menus, covering the…

The sad truth is we currently live in a world where everyone wants to get paid, and fast; so Freshbooks, Visa and Mastercard are working towards making E-payments occur as fast as humanly possible. So how are all these quick transactions of currency going to happen? Let’s first take a look at what Freshbooks is up to. Founded in Toronto back in 2003 as a cloud based accountancy software, they’ve moved into the credit card reader business to accept cards through a smartphone. They announced it back in December and have tested it with invite only customers for a limited time. Their $29 reader is a direct competitor for Jack Dorsey’s Square which went public 3 months ago. The reader unit that plugs directly into an iPhone’s audio jack and is designed to help freelancers and small-business owners go “cash-free” by accepting most common bank payment cards. However, the card reader integrates with FreshBooks broader software offering, meaning that merchants’ invoices and financial reports will be synced in real time when each payment is processed. In addition to the $29, merchants will be charged 2.7 percent + $0.30 for each Visa and MasterCard transaction, and 3.4 percent + $0.30 for American…

“Everything’s becoming intelligent, but the limiting factor of intelligence is access to structured data,” Tung says. Diffbot, an artificial intelligence company that helps clients extract and combine data from multiple Web sources wants to scrape all the data on the web (all of it) to put it into a structured format. Making it useful for all sorts of business purposes and make money doing so. The company says its technology “uses computer vision and NLP algorithms to extract and structure any web page into the world’s largest structured database… with no human curation or oversight.” Founded in 2009 The Palo Alto, CA-based startup announced today it raised $10 million from investors to expand its “knowledge-as-a-service” offerings to businesses and consumer apps. They have raised close to $13 million since its seed round in 2012. Diffbot’s plan is to catalog trillions of facts across the Web—many of them drawn from page elements such as comment forums, which can’t be mined by traditional search engines. Web-mining can be a competitive advantage for apps as well as the proliferating devices of the Internet of Things, Tung says. The startup says it has made a significant start on that goal, having indexed 1.2 billion…